CloudFlare Keeps TheBayLights.org Running Bright

The Art

When you think of San Francisco, undoubtedly one bridge in particular
comes to mind - The Golden Gate Bridge. This year, however, the Bay
Bridge is getting its moment in the spotlight thanks to Words Pictures
Ideas, a CloudFlare customer.

Partnering with internationally renowned light artist Leo Villareal, Ben
and the WPI team began working on what would become the world's largest
LED light sculpture: The Bay Lights.

The Plan

The Bay Lights were officially unveiled on March 5, 2013. Brian
VanderZanden, Lead Developer at WPI, knew there would be a surge in
traffic to TheBayLights.org leading up to that day, and most likely a
huge surge in traffic on the day of the unveiling. WPI has many sites on
CloudFlare, including TheBayLights.org. He reached out to CloudFlare to
make sure the site was ready to handle the increase in traffic.

CloudFlare suggested a few small optimizations (minification, an image
that wasn't proxied because on a "grey cloud" DNS record), one useful
reminder
(whitelist
the CloudFlare IPs), and a powerful
recommendation: Cache
Everything.

By default, CloudFlare will cache obviously static
assets,
but pass dynamic HTML through to the customer's webserver. For heavy
load, on content that is not changing rapidly, full HTML pages -- or the
entire site -- can be delivered from CloudFlare's global network,
preserving the customer's webserver, database and other infrastructure.
(Note: combined with single file
purge,
CloudFlare can serve as the global network for delivering a static site
even with rapid changes, much as the Obama 2012 web team
did.)

The Results

On the day of the unveiling, with Cache Everything turned on,
TheBayLights.org saw traffic increase with a decrease on their system's
resource utilization.

By mid-day, a rush in traffic caused more load than the event's peak at
8:00 pm. The graph below shows an interesting resource demand for the
site pre/post cache everything:

The site saw the largest influx of traffic between 8:00-9:00 pm, but the
average I/O during that hour was under 2Mb/s. By midnight traffic was
back down to only 2X of baseline traffic levels.

"We began to celebrate at 9:15 pm as we were confident that the peak in
site traffic had been reached and there were no issues," said Brian. "We
are thrilled with the guidance and help CloudFlare offered in keeping us
online during our biggest moment of the year, as well as the day to day
performance and security they provide for all of our sites."

The Bay Lights will continue to shine for the next two years, creating
yet another tourist stop in San Francisco. At CloudFlare, we are excited
to be a part of the experience and look forward to helping keep
TheBayLights.org shining online.